5.8. Hints and Tips

This section distills some Bugzilla tips and best practices
that have been developed.

5.8.1. Autolinkification

Bugzilla comments are plain text - so typing <U> will
produce less-than, U, greater-than rather than underlined text.
However, Bugzilla will automatically make hyperlinks out of certain
sorts of text in comments. For example, the text
"http://www.bugzilla.org" will be turned into a link:
http://www.bugzilla.org.
Other strings which get linkified in the obvious manner are:

bug 12345

comment 7

bug 23456, comment 53

attachment 4321

mailto:george@example.com

george@example.com

ftp://ftp.mozilla.org

Most other sorts of URL

A corollary here is that if you type a bug number in a comment,
you should put the word "bug" before it, so it gets autolinkified
for the convenience of others.

5.8.2. Comments

If you are changing the fields on a bug, only comment if
either you have something pertinent to say, or Bugzilla requires it.
Otherwise, you may spam people unnecessarily with bug mail.
To take an example: a user can set up their account to filter out messages
where someone just adds themselves to the CC field of a bug
(which happens a lot.) If you come along, add yourself to the CC field,
and add a comment saying "Adding self to CC", then that person
gets a pointless piece of mail they would otherwise have avoided.

Don't use sigs in comments. Signing your name ("Bill") is acceptable,
if you do it out of habit, but full mail/news-style
four line ASCII art creations are not.

5.8.3. Server-Side Comment Wrapping

Bugzilla stores comments unwrapped and wraps them at display time. This
ensures proper wrapping in all browsers. Lines beginning with the ">"
character are assumed to be quotes, and are not wrapped.

5.8.4. Dependency Tree

On the “Dependency tree” page linked from each bug
page, you can see the dependency relationship from the bug as a
tree structure.

You can change how much depth to show, and you can hide resolved bugs
from this page. You can also collaps/expand dependencies for
each bug on the tree view, using the [-]/[+] buttons that appear
before its summary. This option is not available for terminal
bugs in the tree (that don't have further dependencies).